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Prediction on IT's Future World

)There's going to be an AI age or user revolution, so no one won't take pains to programme harder than before.

)A lot of programmer posts or jobs will fade out as the user can write his programs without needing to have the programming knowledge.
>>There's only one room left for the very brilliant programmers.

)A lot of designer posts or jobs will fade out as the user can get or buy the ready-made templates easily.
>>There's only one room left for the very brilliant designers.

)Flash vs HTML/Javascript :
All future websites will surely tend to be flash or flash-like websites with much 3D user-interactive animation
depending on the growth of Network Communication Technology.

)As the Internet grows, the business grows. The Databases of all business becomes more and more important. Therefore, there will becomes more demands for jobs in database administraion such as database administrator.Either the jobs in Network administrators.

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So how do you want to predict the IT's Future world? Do you agree with the above prediction?

everyone can write, and still there are a lott of professional writers (authers, copywrighters, journalists etc)
everyone can take a photo, and still there are a lott of professional photographers
everyone can cook a diner, and still there are a lott of restaurants, snackbars etc
...
everyone is already capable of creating a simple websebsite, yes, but most of these sites are just personal websites of Joe Regular who wants to show his holidaypictures or the latest promotions for his pizeria. You know, the kind of sites that wouldn't have been created if the owner couldn't have gotten it for free. If such sites are created or not is completely irrelevant for professional webdeveloppers and webdesigners. codegenerators and free templatesites aren't realy the latest thing in IT.

so i don't see anything prophetic in your prediction.

i also don't agree that all future sites will be flash or flashlike. Cartoons didn't replace regular movies and it's just the same with a lott of text-based sites.

DBA's and NA's aren't getting more important.
Functional and Technical Analist are. Data-analists are. Data-miners are. Neural Network specialists are. Categorisation-experts are. Just like IT-professions that also have some expertise in the business processes of the sector they work in.

IT is only getting more intresting for people who realy want to get envolved, and there are still a lott of opportunitys for everyone with enough motivation.

There's going to be an AI age or user revolution, so no one won't take pains to programme harder than before

AI will need to be programmed first by talented human computer programmers, and it would be senseless to hand control of AI over to AI constructs, so even if AI becomes a major piece of technology it will probably need to be constantly maintained and updated by human programmers. As for a user revolution, it won't happen as long as people have lives outside of their computers. Anybody can learn Visual Basic in a relatively short time, but most people aren't interested in picking up programming languages or the methods of thinking that are attached to them.

A lot of designer posts or jobs will fade out as the user can get or buy the ready-made templates easily.

Even if people only wanted to use templates, the templates themselves would have to be designed and new ones would constantly need to be developed in order to keep the internet from going design-stagnant. Templates are already available and designers still have jobs, so IMO templates won't be a problem.

)Flash vs HTML/Javascript :
All future websites will surely tend to be flash or flash-like websites with much 3D user-interactive animation
depending on the growth of Network Communication Technology.

3D is an interesting concept for operating system GUIs, but not so much for web pages. It makes little sense to have to turn a spinning cube (for example) to get links and content when with HTML it's all layed out in front of me (most of the time) in a simple, accessible, and professional manner. Do I really need menus to bounce into view when opened and text to move when I put my cursor over it? For creative or multimedia applications it makes sense, but other than that (X)HTML is the language of the internet and should either remain as such or be replaced with a backwards-compatible standard static format that fixes any inadequacies discovered in the future with XHTML. Though I don't doubt that the current internet speeds hold some people back from making flash sites, IMO most developers would stick with HTML if all internet users in the world were suddenly put on T3 connections. There's really no reason to believe that future users will view the web differently (assuming I'm not too out of touch with the current ones), either. At least, that's my prediction.

I don't believe we'll ever invent AI ... first we'd have to understand the mind, and we're so far away from that it's laughable. It could be argued that the mind is fundamentally un-understandable, at least in any kind of objective sense, because the only tool we have to study it with is another mind.

What we might do is create it by accident .. it may, for example, turn out that any sufficiently long chain of carbon atoms just acheives consciousness spontaneously ... maybe that could then go on to explain to us how our own minds work (if it doesn't kill us first )

Now telepathic user interfaces ... that would be cool - no need for usability testing if a website can just know what you want ...

Last edited by brothercake; 02-01-2005 at 05:16 AM.

"Why bother with accessibility? ... Because deep down you know that the web is attractive to people who aren't exactly like you." - Joe Clark

Don't Fear the WYSIWYG

)A lot of programmer posts or jobs will fade out as the user can write his programs without needing to have the programming knowledge.
>>There's only one room left for the very brilliant programmers.

So who makes the programs these people are using to write programs? Monkeys? Elves? No, regular programmers -- exactly the same as those who produce todays WYSInothinglikeWYG apps. Programmers aren't going to sit idly by and let Joe Shmoe catch up to them. Not in a million years.

)A lot of designer posts or jobs will fade out as the user can get or buy the ready-made templates easily.
>>There's only one room left for the very brilliant designers.

Big clients (and smart clients) will never accept 'off the shelf' templates. Templates by nature are required to be non-descript to a certain extent. You really think Coke are going to spend 2 million on a template? If everyone's using templates, then that is what the existing designers will produce. Supply and demand.

)Flash vs HTML/Javascript :
All future websites will surely tend to be flash or flash-like websites with much 3D user-interactive animation
depending on the growth of Network Communication Technology.

Flash-like from the user's perspective, perhaps, but I doubt they will be in a binary format like flash.

)As the Internet grows, the business grows. The Databases of all business becomes more and more important. Therefore, there will becomes more demands for jobs in database administraion such as database administrator.Either the jobs in Network administrators.

...and all the servers will cause the planet to rise in temperature by 5 degrees celcius, melting the polar ice caps. Woohoo! Go nerds.

I think that although more home PC users might start creating programs etc and programming, there will always be Professionals in the line of IT because not everyone takes a interest in it that much, unfortunatly to say - so there will always be a need for IT Professionals (like me someday....i hope )

About AI: We will create domain specific AI that are quite indistinguishable from humans - the gaming industry is driving the development in this today, and not the universities and LISP companies like it was ten-fifteen years ago. It's only a question of learning how to make a pattern based decision base instead of a number crunching one. However, I don't think it's quite possible to create a non-domain-specific AI that behaves indistinguishable from humans without it having the experiences and limitations of a human. (Whether "indistinguishable from humans" is a requirement or not is questionable, but it's the rule of the current paradigm.)

Also, I don't think we need at all to understand what we're doing in constructing an AI - an AI can be constructed by comparison to human behavior, where you change the parameters to make the AI behave like the human does in all observable cases. The problem with this is that we can't make sure the AI behaves like a human when outside factors differ very strongly to those that the AI behavior have been tested in.

About 3D: 3D in the next ten years will remain just like it is today - application specific (games mostly), virtual (any display of 3D on a 2D device will lack important features needed for the brain to react to it as 3D), and in the case of interface it will be layered 2D and not true 3D. The reasons for this are many. The first is that for a 3D interface to really work you need a way to, without any time consumption by "walking", interact with objects in different places in all three dimensions. The typical sci-fi version of this kind of interface is the 3D interactive glove. And sure, that works to some extent, but it's got a real limitation - imagine working with an application placed deep and high, you'd have to stretch out your arms above your head for a prolonged time - it's not good UI. The other alternative from the sci-fi world is today far from being realistically implementable, being "total immersion", where you hijack neural signals for a virtual reality.

There is another alternative, not often seen in sci-fi, but actually implementable in the real world. It's based on a separation of interface between interacting and selecting* - you let the eye point out a selection vector in all three dimensions, and use a 1D interaction device such as a keyboard for actual interaction. This interaction device actually works in reality (it's been built and is actively developed), but it demands technology that we don't have. You see, for this to work we can't use 2D screens - we actually have to implement graphics displays for three dimensions so that we can give the eye a focus differentiation. Otherwise the display device makes the entire system a 2D limitation.

3D or Flash on the web: Of course, that tells you something about what I think of 3D on the web - if the rich, client side applications will retain current limitations, so will the web. And 3D on the web will be used for the same things as 3D on the web today. As for Flash, Flash like environments or interactivity on the web, I think you'll not see a large move towards Flash - Flash will remain strong, but it's gotten strong opponents for several domains lately. SVG will, some time in the future, move in as a replacement to some Flash graphics. SVG is, of course, Flash-like in many aspects, so it's definitely a move in that direction. The real win for SVG will still be in the domain that Flash already has. I don't see SVG as a potential replacement to HTML+CSS or PDF. HTML+CSS will evolve, though. It'll move towards XML and WHATWG specifications orthogonally, and CSS+ES+DOM will provide interactivity that competes with Flash on the low end. There will appear SVG, Flash, Java, XAML and XUL rich networking applications that have the processing server side while still having a user interaction and rendering client side. They will still not take a major share from HTML though, because HTML is too good for static content and textual/graphical presentation to lose especially many applications.

Computer wise: Uniprocessor will be replaced by dualprocessor. Dualprocessor will be replaced by polyprocessor. Programming will change dramatically as serial execution becomes the bottleneck, and non-symmetric concurrent programming will replace symmetric and non-concurrent programming. This means a change in programming language design that will make a lot of UNIX driven languages and concepts lose to less monolithic systems. The remainder will be strongly and easily threaded. Except for that, computers won't change much - miniaturisation of course, and replacement of old interfaces and transport technologies with new ones, but it'll remain about the same.

* The mouse is another example of this. It's really two devices in one: a 2D selection device and a 1D interaction device.

The other alternative from the sci-fi world is today far from being realistically implementable, being "total immersion", where you hijack neural signals for a virtual reality.

I agree that it's far from being realistically implemented, but if I understand what's being described above, it is being implemented in real-world situations already.

Cochlear implants have been around since the early eighties and create the 'illusion' of sound for people who have limited or no hearing. An external device picks up sounds, which are sent as weak electrical signals to the surface of the auditory nerve through a series of electrodes.

By selectively stimulating electrodes on different areas of the nerve, the brain interprets the signal as having a higher or lower pitch.

It's a crude reproduction compared to natural hearing, but an example of how 'real' reality translates into 'virtual' reality.

Edit:Of course, the technology does require major surgery. Which is why it's a way off from widespread use.

Last edited by mcdougals4all; 02-01-2005 at 08:49 PM.

Computer, kill Flanders... Did I hear my name? My ears are burning...
Good start. Now finish the job.

I agree that it's far from being realistically implemented, but if I understand what's being described above, it is being implemented in real-world situations already.

Not really, no. You're talking about replacing a non-functional function by a crude imitation. Sure, it can be done, but it's far from usable in this case. First of all, by doing that surgery, as I understand it, you irreversibly destroy the old (in this case non-working) connections when you place the new ones. You're orders of magnitude from getting a 1-to-1 replacement of a fully functional hearing. Second, you're talking about an output device. Sure, that might be a later stage, but the first thing you would need for the "total immersion" is the input device - you need to hijack some efferent nerve, preferably the motor controls for the arms, hands or fingers as well as the affent proprioception. This connection need to reroute the signal, meaning that it goes to and from the computer instead of the arm, hand or fingers. It also needs to be easily and neurally controllably toggleable, meaning that you can at any moment route the signal back again without outside interaction needed. Oh, and just to complicate things, you need to retain the natural tonus of the nerves you've just disabled to avoid tissue degeneration.

To make matters even more complicated, the body doesn't use a single nerve for a single signal. It uses many nerves for the same signal, and many signals in the same nerve, and sometimes a signal is just a triggering of a reflex (actually, most of our muscle activity is generated this way), sometimes the signal is rerouted in and amplified (or repressed) on the way, and sometimes it goes directly all the way (in humans at least - this kind of muscle control doesn't exists in cats (the typical test species for this kind of neurology) and many other mammals).

And considering the way the brain is developed, there are countless of other factors that come into play that I won't go into. (Does my being a med student show, I wonder? )